


Fear These Good Omens

by Jakowic



Series: Necrom ‘verse [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Body snatching, M/M, Necromancy, magical detectives AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23867419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jakowic/pseuds/Jakowic
Summary: "Jason is--"an old friend, a brother, incredibly smart, the most talented man I've ever met, back from the dead, arrogant, a colleague."a shithead sometimes," is what Dick diplomatically settles for.-Dick Grayson, magical homicide detective extraordinaire, is searching for a serial killer who's been murdering Selkies in Gotham's Narrows. In order to figure out who, he's going to have to enlist the legally dubious assistance of St Mary's Outlaws necromancy professor.(magic AU)
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd
Series: Necrom ‘verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1727380
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38





	Fear These Good Omens

**Author's Note:**

> keep an eye open for some of my favorite D:BH background characters. i gave them small cameos :)  
> -  
> i fucked up the math on dick's and jason's ages on this and didn't realize until i was almost fucking FINISHED so.... rip me lol. 
> 
> [helpful guide to jakowic's bad dickjay age math](%E2%80%9C)  
> 

Dick’s hand tightens around the bouquet. He raises his hand to knock on the door and pulls back at the last second, exhaling messily. It’s quiet here, and Dick is grateful. Walking through all the noise at reception messed with his nerves, and frankly, he’s tempted to turn around right now. But he should say hi, right?

“Dude,” Wally’s voice echoes from the other side. “I can see your shadow.”

Dick smiles ruefully to himself. He opens the door and takes a look at Wally’s face. His right eye is swollen shut, his hair sticks up in all directions. His leg is elevated and in a cast, his arm too, and when Dick looks closer he can see the bandages on his chest. The blinds to the one window are open, allowing the afternoon light in, illuminating Get Well Soon! balloons and countless cards scattered about. 

He’s smiling. Dick winces.

“You look like shit,” Dick tells him.

Wally laughs. “Bro, the stuff they have me on feels fucking amazing. I don’t know which way is up.”

Dick sighs, walking further into the room, allowing the door to shut behind him. He puts the flowers on the table beside Wally’s bed and takes the chair there. On the other side of the bed, Wally’s heart monitor beeps softly, and the IV drip stands, drip, drip, drip.

“I’m gonna have to ask you some questions, Wally,” Dick says, hating his job. 

“I know, man.” Wally leans back against his pillows and closes his good eye. “Let’s get this over with.”

Dick takes out his notepad and his ballpoint. “Can you tell me who the man that beat you was?”

“No.”

“Did you see his face?”

“No, he was wearing um... a clown mask.”

Dick inhales between his teeth, involuntary and sharp. He doesn't think Wally notices, he's too busy grimacing as he shifts in the bed, attempting to get comfortable. Dick pulls himself together.

“Do you know what he beat you with?”

“Crowbar. And then he left, something distracted him… or scared him away. He would’ve killed me otherwise. I heard Barbara yelling, so I got up and looked for her. Then the building blew.”

Dick finishes scrawling notes in his shorthand and tucks his notepad away.

“Okay, now. As a friend: how bad is it?”

Wally opens his eye. “Four cracked ribs, broken arm, broken leg, fractured foot. I’m stuck here for two weeks. Nurse says maybe more.”

Dick stands up. "Well, heal fast. I need my partner out there with me to solve all this."

-^-

Standing in front of the wrought iron gates of St Mary's Outlaws, Dick realizes that there's five days left in the school year, five bodies, and five seconds until he throws up on the front lawn.

St Mary's Outlaws is a boarding school for troubled kids with uncontrollable magic. Dick has never been inside, but when he was seventeen-almost-eighteen, he’d heard a lot about it. The lawn is perfectly manicured, and the hedges look gorgeous. The school itself looks like a monstrous cathedral-had-sex-with-a-castle, complete with gargoyles and spired towers. It’s a lovely June day, sunny and warm, but cold darkness emanates from the building, like it’s the dead of winter. Dick takes three steps up the wide stone steps, turns around, and heads back down. He paces the sidewalk, runs his hands through his hair, and turns back up the steps.

He touches the gates, and they swing open to him, allowing him to step onto the granite path to the huge oak front doors of the school. He squares his shoulders and begins his soldier’s march.

He makes it to the school’s reception area, asks where he can find room 242.

“Oh,” the older nun says, “Down the hall on the left there’s a staircase that leads to the dungeon. It’ll be three or four rooms to the right after that.”

Dick smiles at her. “Thank you, ma’am. Have a lovely afternoon.”

He stands outside room 242, mouth dry, trying to gather the courage to knock on the door. Here’s the thing: inside that room, there is an unpredictable monster, a veritable unstable cocktail of eight thousand possibilities. Dick could die, he thinks dramatically, upon the mere opening of the door. Perhaps the world would cease to exist. Maybe worse. 

Dick raps his knuckles twice and opens the door. 

There’s about twenty -- more or less, Dick can’t count that fast -- kids packing up school supplies. They all send him curious glances but don’t say anything to him, so Dick looks toward the front. The man standing up there has his back to the rest of the room, and he looks like nothing but a frightening shadow. He's bent over a desk, and Dick can hear the scratch of a pen on paper. It's deadly silent here, and about ten degrees colder than the hallway. 

The bell tolls, like a genuine, archaic church bell toll, and the students pass Dick on their way out, giggling and talking amongst themselves. Dick waits, hands in pockets, for the kids to leave. When they're gone, Dick finds his throat dry, staring at the front of the room, almost sightless. How long has it been? At least four months, Dick thinks, since Tim started to board at his university.

There's a sigh, then a slight rustle, then there are shadows being whipped at him at light speed, pinning him up against the wall by the door. 

"Jason," Dick says, then a tendril of black presses against his throat, cutting off his air.

Jason's eyes are glowing that preternatural green, his pupils swallowed by the glow. He looks frightening, dressed in all black with his long overcoat flowing out behind him like a cape, shadows leaking from his body. The places where the black touches Dick are ice cold, and he feels his skin start to numb. He moves toward Dick slowly, a mass of power and fury. His shoes click against the granite of the dungeon floor, echoing with every step. 

His hair is slightly longer than the last time Dick saw him, his curls are noticeable now, and that Frankenstein-esque white streak is there. Dick remembers, the first couple of years after his return, he dyed it out. Jason gets closer, and there’s his freckles, and that little scar at the corner of his mouth from something early in childhood, and the slit in his eyebrow from when Bruce had to get him stitched up after a fight.

Dick tries to pry the tendril off his throat, starting to feel the choke in earnest. He kicks out, tries to convey _you moron, it's me_ with his eyes alone.

All at once, the shadows are pulled back, and Dick drops onto his knees, gasping and rubbing at his throat. It'll probably bruise. He looks up, and Jason's eyes still have that glow to them, the shadows that hover around his frame are writhing and thrashing.

"Hello to you too," Dick croaks out. "Is that how you greet everyone?"

Jason sneers. "What do you want?"

Dick climbs to his feet. There's a lot of ways to answer that. "What I _want_ is to let you know that I've got a lead on your case."

Jason laughs, it's that mean laugh that he had when Dick first met him, that Narrows kid laugh, it said _I'm making fun of you_ and _you're fucking dead_. The glow fades marginally from Jason's eyes and the shadows disappear altogether. That's one of the new things about him: that glow never really goes away. He laces his fingers together behind his back, looks down at Dick with that jagged smile.

Dick stands a little more than a head shorter now, and it's infuriating in that way it is when someone younger surpasses you. Dick fixes him with a level look.

"You're full of shit. My case went into the cold files six and a half years ago."

"I'm not kidding, Jay. I've got a break, a _real_ one. You might want to sit down for this."

Jason is almost twenty-five, so Dick isn't expecting the remarkable childishness when he says, "I don't need to sit down, _Dickie,_ I died. Not much gets grosser than that."

Dick sighs at him. He's always been like this though, a little voice says in the back of his head. When he was thirteen and Bruce brought him home for the first time, he was angry pretty much constantly. Dick wasn't around often, and when he was it wasn't exactly Full House, but he was there enough to know. Dick shouldn't be pulling a good ol' Bruce 'better than this' routine, he _died._ Not many people do that and survive to tell the tale. 

"Four days ago, Wally and I--" Jason scoffs, Dick ignores him, "were called in for the third Selkie murder in the last month. The first one was missing her pelt and her ears. The second, same deal, except she was also sans fingertips. The third was brutalized and missing all the same -- confirmed serial. We were canvassing--"

"The Narrows docks," Jason says. "I know; Selkie neighborhood. These girls, were they prostitutes?"

Dick gives him a grin. "Sharp. We found a lead, or we thought a lead. She told us to come back late at night, so we let the Chief and Barbara know, and went down there."

"Great story," Jason says. He crosses his arms, cocks an eyebrow. "I'm fucking riveted. But what does this have to do with me?"

Dick holds up a hand. "Wally and I split up when we heard noises coming from a warehouse. I got caught in the back by two kids packing heat, had a little gunfight. Called Babs for backup. Meanwhile, Wally was in the warehouse getting beat to shit. He got out, the building blew, and he's in the hospital."

Jason barks out his mean laugh. "Okay, that was worth it. Thank you, Dick. You can leave now."

Dick holds up his hand again. "The guy was wearing a clown mask. He beat the girl with a crowbar, and Wally and..."

Jason's face is completely blank. He's gotten so much better at poker than when he was younger. Dick doesn't know what Jason's feeling, but Dick _loves_ it, loves that he's so close, that he can taste it between his teeth, he can just bite down and break skin. He can do this, heal some of that hurt, patch up part of Jason.

"You."

-^-

"How'd it go?" Barbara asks, sitting down on his desk before Dick even reaches it.

"It went okay. He's on a lot of drugs," he shrugs off his tan overcoat and drapes it over the back of his computer chair. He folds his arms on top of it and leans against it, too jittery to sit. "But he said something interesting. The guy that almost killed him was wearing a clown mask."

Barbara's face doesn't change. She knew Jason as much as Dick did, but he forgets she wasn't there in the aftermath, that she wasn't at the manor and never saw how Dick's family fell apart. She never asked him what he spent time doing before Jason returned. Besides, there probably aren't very many people left in the department that have Jason's case file memorized anymore.

"I remembered that detail from Jason's case, so I went to see him."

Barbara cringes, inhales through her teeth. "How'd that go?"

Dick shrugs. "He tried to strangle me at first. Still not super clear on the why. But then we actually talked, and he seems the same. He took the news... blankly? His face shut down, I couldn't read him at all, Babs. He politely escorted me out too, walked down the sidewalk away from me like a bitchy goth vampire in broad daylight."

Barbra laughs, adjusts her glasses on her nose. "Anything else?"

Dick shrugs. "I guess I'm gonna have to try the docks again, check with forensics, see if they turned anything up."

Barbara nods. "Any time for a coffee in between there?"

"Don't you have a girl at reception to flirt with?"

Barbara gives him that deer in headlights look. "Kate?"

"The fact that you supplied a name proves that you do." Dick offers her a smile as he sits down and boots up his computer. "I'll free up some time tomorrow afternoon. I'll meet you here?"

Barbara gives him a withering look and stands to leave. "I am _not_ going to go flirt with her."

"Okay," Dick says, opening his email.

"I'm going to go back to my computer," she says, backing away.

"Okay," Dick says, typing up what is most definitely not a whiny how-do-you-do, but a professional inquisition into whether or not anything interesting has cropped up in the autopsy of their latest unknown Selkie.

When Dick looks up, Barbara is gone. Since he's here, he should probably start writing up the incident report, the crime report, and update the case file but... Dick wants to go out to the docks, poke around that warehouse, talk to people. His partner is in the hospital, Jason’s case is officially reopened, and Dick wants to _move._ So, he stands up, grabs his jacket, and heads back out of the office. He passes Bock’s office on the way out, and sees that Gordon’s in there. Dick walks faster.

He’s in the lobby, shrugging on his overcoat, struggling a little with his arm so he’s sufficiently distracted when he almost smacks straight into someone. He stops short, reflexes saving them both from an almost certain collision. He looks up at the person’s face, grin and apology on his lips.

His mind helpfully goes blank.

“Where are you going?” Jason asks.

 _Um,_ goes Dick’s brain. He’s wearing all black still, like a fucking cliche, but it’s not a tailored button-up and a long black coat, it’s a shirt and a leather jacket and ripped jeans and he looks every bit like teenage Jason did, but there’s something… older about him, too. The sharper jawline, the fact that his face isn’t permanently set in a scowl.

“Had to change out of the school uniform?” is what comes out of Dick’s mouth when he means to say _to the docks._

Jason’s expression slides into irritation, and something interesting happens to his face. Dick has to blink twice but, no, that’s definitely a blush. 

“They’re professional.”

“They’re sexy schoolteacher clothes,” Dick says, and then forcibly brings his brain back online, “I’m going to look at the warehouse.” He pulls the rest of his jacket on successfully. It occurs to Dick he should ask what Jason’s doing here. “Why are you here?”

“Take me with you.”

“No.”

“Dick, it’s my neighborhood. I grew up in the Narrows. I know those people.”

“No,” Dick says again. “I could get in so much trouble. You’re a civilian.”

“I’m a threat,” Jason promises.

Dick sighs. He does that a lot around Jason, apparently. “I can’t. Either you’ll get hurt and it’ll be on my head, risking my job and this case, or you’ll kill the guy who killed you, which risks my job and this case.”

“You don’t have a partner right now,” Jason says. Dick doesn’t want to argue with him about Wally. “You need someone out there to watch your back.”

Dick laughs. “Jay, you strangled me like two hours ago. I know I’m usually all funsie-wunsie fuck the rules, but I _can’t._ Bock will kill me, and I’m sorry, even with your evil shadow powers I am ten times more scared of her than you.”

 _I’m not scared of you at all,_ he doesn’t say. He edges around Jason, pulling his car keys out of his pocket as he goes. “I promise, I’ll update you the minute anything happens. I’m waiting on an autopsy report.”

He lets the glass door swing shut behind him with a thud. He feels Jason’s eyes on him all the way down the steps.

-^-

When he arrives, the scene is cordoned off with yellow tape and a uniformed car flashing its lights. Dick ducks under the tape and is treated to the sight of rubble crawling with uniforms, techies in jumpsuits and blue shoe covers, and a few curious onlookers.

Dick heads over to the tiny crowd on the left of the building. They’re all pressed up against the tape, muttering to one another. Dick flashes his friendliest smile.

“What happened?” one of them asks, a short girl with a pixie cut and elven ears.

“The whole neighborhood heard the noise,” a bald man wearing a wife-beater chimes in.

“It was a terrorist,” a teenage boy with a frown says darkly. “Who else would blow up a building?”

“It wasn’t a terrorist,” Dick says. “It’s likely that the building had a few barrels of gasoline in it and faulty wiring. However, there were two perps around here last night, got into a firefight with some cops. Any ideas about that?”

The crowd murmurs lowly.

“Probably a gang,” wife-beater says. “We got plenty of those.”

Dick nods, scribbling _gang?_ in his notepad. “One of our officers was assaulted by a man wearing a clown mask and carrying a crowbar. Did any of you see anyone suspicious last night?”

Everyone looks at each other uneasily. They’re all quieter, now, and Dick notices.

“No,” the teenage boy says. “That’s awful, to get beaten with a crowbar.”

The other people are shaking their heads, _no, we didn’t see anything._

Dick flips his notepad shut. “Thank you, please don’t hesitate to come down to the station if you remember anything. I’m Detective Grayson.”

He steps away from the crowd, tucking his notepad into his jacket. He spots his favorite lab rat, distinctive against everyone else with her fire-red hair.

“Kory,” he says.

She looks up, skin golden in the sunlight, and flashes him a blinding smile. “Detective Grayson,” she says. Dick’s always liked the way she says his name in her South African accent, all syllables and soft in her voice.

“What are you up to?”

“Looking for traces of gasoline,” she stands. “Someone definitely knew there were leaky gas pipes in this building. The electrical box is smashed to bits, too.”

“Any reason why someone would rig a random building to blow? I’m assuming luring Wally and I down here was on purpose, but why blow it up, too?”

“Hide evidence,” Koriand’r suggests. “It doesn’t really work, but laymen don’t know that.”

“How likely is it that any of this,” Dick gestures expansively to the rubble, “will yield anything?”

“Honestly? Not likely. We’d have a better chance with another murder.”

Dick nods. “That leaves those gunmen, then, and the Selkie brothel. We’ll have to hope one of those things pans out, otherwise, we’ll be hitting a dead end.”

Koriand’r clicks her tongue. “What’re you thinking for the gunmen?”

“Gang affiliation, I accidentally interrupted a drug deal, bodyguards hired by the clown…” Dick trails off, eyes snagging on the corner of a nearby building. A security camera is sitting up there, tiny red light in the corner blinking happily. “Huh,” he says.

Koriand’r pats him on the arm. “You’re doing that thing again, where you go off. I should finish this up.”

“What,” Dick says, not really looking at her as she kneels back down in the rubble. She waves her hand for him to go away.

He looks around for the nearest uniform, and oh-- there. “Officer Chen,” he calls, striding over toward her.

She looks at him, back straightening. “Yes, Detective?”

“Can you pull security tapes from everything available within a two-block radius?”

She nods. “Sure. Anything else you’d like me to do?”

Dick smiles at her. “Thank you, and no, that’s all.”

She seems eager to go, probably because it relieves her of standing-around-rubble duty. She gestures to another uniform -- probably her partner -- to go with her. He’s about to ask another techie about the smashed electrical box, when his phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s an email from the coroner, the M.E. asking him to head down to the morgue.

Dick knows it’s going to be disgusting.

-^-

The coroner had the decency to leave her body covered, at least. She looks horrendous, barely recognizable. Her hair, spread out on the cold metal table, looks soft and shiny and alive. Dick is suddenly viciously glad he didn’t let Jason come with him to see this, because all he’s thinking right now is _Is this what Jason looked like?_ Dick never saw Jason’s body, Bruce was called for identification, and the funeral was close-casket. It might’ve been worse, Dick thinks, hindbrain horror, supplying Jason’s face broken and bloody.

Her face is mottled and purple and covered in dried blood. Her eyes are closed, but in the crime scene photos, they’re wide open and bloodshot. Her nose is concave, like she was hit square in the face with the crowbar. Her lips are split open, and Dick wouldn’t be surprised if all her teeth were broken.

Her neck and collarbone are death-pale, only a few bruises visible in those areas.

“Alright,” he turns to Dr. Jackson. “Give me the sauce.”

Jackson grins at him. He’s young, bright-eyes, and just as goofy as Dick. They've worked together before, and their senses of humor match up well and lighten the heavy atmosphere of autopsy reports. Dick assumes that under different circumstances they’d have a lot of fun.

“Well,” Jackson starts, pulling on gloves. “As you can see, she’s suffered pretty badly. Heavy bruising all over her body, internal bleeding, all consistent with being beaten with a heavy, blunt object.”

“We think the same guy who did this also beat my partner,” Dick says, sliding his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “With a crowbar,” he adds, just so see how it feels. The words are heavy. Dick never used to tell people that Jason died, much less how it happened, but he’d practiced in the mirror when he was first getting used to how quiet it seemed in the manor without him.

Jackson nods. “A crowbar could definitely do this. She also has ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. The bruising there is extensive. I think maybe chains, or she pulled against the ropes a lot, but there’s no chafing or redness. Her knees are bruised too, not from beating, but from kneeling.”

He pulls up the sheet to show Dick her legs, gesturing at all the affected areas. The legs are untouched by bruises except her knees, and Dick is never going to get used to that death-pale color on a person.

Dick hums at the back of his throat, and an image of her chained to the ground, forced to kneel, chained comes unbidden to his mind. She was probably held like that when he was beating her. Bile rises and Dick's throat and he coughs into his arm to cover the way he chokes. There’s too much rage in this for it just to be about the Selkie pelts, one of his and Wally’s earlier working theories. 

“Her ears and fingertips were cut off with a saw, the teeth leave ragged ends.” Jackson picks up her hand to show Dick the ragged edges of her skin. “The ears were removed postmortem, the fingertips were not. And, I found broken teeth in her throat.”

Dick blinks. “Does that mean something?”

“Just that she was most likely alive when the murderer was hitting her face. And this,” Jackson gestures expansively to all of her, “wasn’t the cause of death. There was potassium chloride in her blood.”

“Lethal injection,” Dick says. 

“Yeah. No relaxers or pain killers though, and the dosage was weak and wasn’t anywhere near a carotid. It took her hours to die.”

“Maximum suffering. This doesn’t make any sense.”

Jackson makes a noise at the back of his throat. “I don’t know why anyone would kill anyone else. I’d be out of a job if they stopped though, so there’s that.”

“No,” Dick shakes his head. “Not that. Ten years ago, this guy beat a boy to death and blew up the warehouse where he did it. Now his first victim in ten years wasn’t beaten, but strangled. He gassed the second one and now this. What’s he doing with their pelts?”

“You’re sure it’s all the same guy?” Jackson asks, leaning against a blacktop counter.

Dick nods. “Yeah, the missing ears connect all these Selkie cases, and my partner says the guy who attacked him was wearing a clown mask, which is consistent with the cold case. We only know he’s the Selkie killer because one of the girls down at the docks told us we could get our lead at the location he ambushed us at.”

Jackson shakes his head. “Sounds like a frustrating puzzle. This is why I’m not a detective.”

“I wish I had your foresight.”

Dick’s phone buzzes. It’s Barbara, asking him where he is. He shuts it off and puts it back in his pocket. Convenient escape.

“I better go,” he says.

Jackson waves at him sardonically as he leaves. “I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

-^-

He strides into the bullpen, drapes his coat over the back of his chair and drops, heavy, onto it. He boots up his computer and grins at the email Officer Chen sent with a short note attached. He’s cracking his knuckles and stretching his back, preparing to spend the night straining his eyes watching grainy videotapes.

“Grayson!” Bock barks, head sticking out of her office. “Get in here!”

Dick looks around at his fellow detectives, who all give him equally confused faces. Dick stands up and mentally pauses his videotape enthusiasm. He leans down when he passes Barbara’s desk, and she sends him a grimace.

“Let’s hope I didn’t do anything stupid.”

“Your life is stupid,” she snipes back, like a child. Dick sticks his tongue out at her, like an adult.

He goes into Bock’s office, the door clicking solidly shut behind him. He looks from Bock, who is five foot four, keeps her blonde hair in a military-tight bun and has paper-thin lips, to Jason, who is six feet and a lot, covered in shadows, and gives the Statue of Liberty a run for her money in terms of imposing. It’s very strange, and Dick belatedly realizes that the blinds to her office are shut.

“What’s going on here?” he asks, dragging out the a in what. He looks from Jason to Bock.

Her posture is ramrod straight, head held haughtily high, and even though Dick is bigger than her, she scares the shit out of him. He cuts his eyes to Jason, who gives him a roguish grin, that says _yes, I did do this._ She’s standing behind her desk, hands clasped behind her back. Jason’s standing in the shadowy corner of her office and all the dark spots seem to bend and drape and reach for him.

“I’d like you to have Mr Todd assist in your Selkie case.”

“Uh, no,” Dick’s mouth goes without direction from his brain. “He’s a civilian.”

“He’s an insider to the community, Detective Grayson. The Selkie people are private and would like to keep to themselves, however, this is a matter of utmost importance regarding their safety. They’re likely to trust a familiar face, and I’m certain you could use a little boost.”

Dick cuts his eyes to Jason, whose face is a mask of pure gloating. Dick wets his lips, feeling like this is going to end very, very terribly.

“Captain, I really don’t think--”

“I am ordering you to take him on as a consultant.”

“With all due respect,” Dick says, voice a little louder than strictly necessary. “He’s too close to this case. I’d rather--”

“I assure you, officers, that I will be on my best behavior,” Jason fixes Dick with that flat stare, that dead stare, eyes glowing softly, like the lamplights in the park at night. Jason gives him a bloodless smile, which is really just Jason baring his teeth. “I just want to help.”

Dick swings around to look back at Bock. “Captain--”

“It’s an order, Detective,” she stares at him, daring him to start something. “Dismissed.”

Dick closes his eyes, inhales sharply through his nose, pivots on his heel and exits. The second he steps out of the office, everyone in the bullpen is looking at him. Sufficiently grumpy, Dick doesn’t check to see if Jason’s behind him. He just walks past Barbara’s desk. When Jason was -- gone, Dick had managed to get through the academy and start slogging through beat cop duty and he remembers, sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, Dick would think he could see fifteen-year-old Jason standing in the shadows, just out of reach during patrol. He feels that now, the shadow of him in the corner of Dick's eye, an echo. Jason must follow him out of the office, because everyone looks at them at once, and pivots to whisper to each other. Fun.

He passes everyone else, passes Wally’s empty desk, and drops into his office chair. Jason slides up to him, all the shadows in the room arc and stretch, pulled to Jason like a magnet pointing due south. It makes everything look wicked and sharp, darker in his presence. Jason leans against the other side of Dick’s desk like Barbara had scant hours ago.

“What are we doing now?” he asks, eyeing Dick’s computer.

Dick swivels the chair around, plants his feet on the cabinet that Jason’s gently banging his heels against, and fixes him with a look. “Rule number one: you cannot kill the guy we’re after.”

Jason makes an offended noise, and his eyes blaze a bit more, a little angry. “I’m not that stupid.”

Dick ignores him. “Rule number two: you have to be nice to Wally. Rule number three--”

“I am nice to Wally!” Jason interrupts. Dick raises an eyebrow at him. He’s brought Wally to dinner once, one that Jason had happened to be blackmailed into, and they do not get along. He knows who the instigator is, if only because he instigates everything.

“Rule number three,” Dick continues. “You are not allowed to pretend to be an officer--” _why would I want to,_ mutters Jason under his breath. He crosses his arms and droops a little, succumbing to the lecture. Dick pretends he didn’t hear that. “-- and you follow my orders.”

“Fine,” Jason bites out, like the word is hard for him to say.

“You follow these rules and I will _consider_ not handcuffing you to this desk. What did you even say to her to get her to agree?”

Jason shrugs. “Just… you know. I grew up in the Narrows.”

Dick somehow doubts that’s what really happened. He sighs, wakes up his computer, and gestures for Jason to lean over his shoulder and see. He does, one hand on the back of Dick’s chair, right by the bare skin on his neck, the other resting on the desk. His face is incredibly close to Dick’s, so much so that Dick can feel the slight puff of his breath.

“We get the insurmountably boring pleasure of scouring hours of security footage. I’m hoping we’ll get something usable.” Dick pulls out his notepad and slides it across the desk to where Jason’s hand is braced. “I have case notes in there, you can look at them and ask questions.”

Jason picks it up, goes back to the spot on Dick’s desk that everyone loves to sit on, and opens it, begins to flip through. Dick hits download on the email attachment and watches as the slow-crawl green download bar pops up. That, at least, is consistent at the GCPD.

“Your handwriting is terrible,” Jason says, looking up at Dick. He taps on Dick’s notepad. “You crossed out selkie pelt black markets?”

“He’s not killing for profit,” Dick picks up a pen and chews on the cap. “We still have tabs on anything that might surface but it’s a long shot. The selkie pelt black market is more a trafficking ring than it is a fur trade, it’d be hard to sell a pelt without a girl.”

“I thought the girls kept their skins separate from themselves if they were on the streets?” Jason looks up and something must be on Dick’s face because he draws his eyebrows down and his face closes. Dick tries to school it into a convincing poker, but it’s too late -- Jason can read Dick, and he’s already responded to whatever he thinks Dick is thinking. “I lived there. Emira Toutaroni was my neighbor growing up, and when mom was too out of it, she’d feed me. She was Selkie.”

“I wasn’t assuming,” Dick says, because he knows Jason would never, ever buy a girl like that. He wishes he could undo that moment. “But no, I haven’t spoken to any of the brothel girls yet, so I’m not sure.”

“Okay, so what about a gang?”

“Someone I spoke to at the warehouse said the kids I got into a firefight with might’ve been gangbangers. It also could’ve been an unhappy coincidence: drug dealers packing heat, goons of various sizes, anything,” Dick taps his pen against his jawline, thinking.

“And you’re sure they’re all related?”

Dick sighs. “I’m hoping they are. I think he’s taking the ears as trophies, the pelts for some other reason, and he targeted me and Wally because we were close.”

“Or he just wanted to play with you.”

Dick shrugs, fidgets with his pen. He leans back in his chair slightly, rolls his eyes up to look at the water stains on the ceiling. He misses Wally, a quiet thing, the way you would miss a best friend that you see every single day.

“How do I fit into all this?”

Dick looks back at Jason. He’s hunched over, brows furrowed, still looking at Dick’s notepad. The shadows in the room are still stretching, grabbing for him, wanting his attention. He looks very young like that: like he’s trying to hide all his vulnerable spots even when he wants to show them. Dick wants to reach out and touch him, but he knows from ages of trying that it’s basically pointless. He gives in to the impulse anyway, lays a light hand on Jason’s knee.

“Hey,” he says softly, coaxing, like the few times he’d talked to Jason after a classic Jason-and-Bruce fight when they were kids. “We’re going to figure this out.”

Jason looks up at him through his eyelashes. Dick is struck, very suddenly, by how green his eyes really are. They are luminescent, like a cat’s, and yes they glow but they are also very, very _green._ Just green. Dick feels himself look for one beat too long, then two, and he finally tears himself away enough to look back at the computer. He pushes away from Jason and pulls his head away from weird shit, like how pretty the light pattern of freckles on Jason’s face are. It’s done with the download, so Dick hits the OK button and opens the first one.

The footage is grainy and incredibly shitty, Dick already feels eyestrain from it. Jason’s back, leaning over him. Dick is very, very careful not to touch any of Jason’s bare skin, fairly certain that Jason will be unnaturally cold, like a dead person. He doesn’t want to remind himself of that, wants to press that little fact as far away as it can get.

The thing is, that’s the great taboo of the world. Necromancy. To raise the dead. The dead stay dead unless you break the laws of nature. Sure, some magic keeps you alive for longer than normal, but to bring someone back to life? Dick’s not sure how it works, how could he be, but he knows that there aren’t many Necromancers anymore, not since international laws passed back in the eighties.

Dick fast forwards through the video, stops about an hour before he and Wally had made it down to the warehouse. The street is empty, stays empty, for one minute, then two. Jason yawns.

“Hey, what’s Wally’s password? I bet this would go faster if we split the videos up.”

Dick shrugs. “Fuck if I know. I bet we could ask Vera in IT for a loner laptop, though. Grab Wally’s chair, you can set up on the other side of my desk.”

Dick heads down the stairs to IT on level one. Vera isn’t in her office when he pokes his head in, so he just grabs a laptop and a bag off the shelf and writes a note on her hot-pink sticky notes in her blue glitter pen. When he gets back, Jason is sorting Dick’s papers into piles and throwing away all the old garbage. Dick pauses as Jason waves his hands, has some shadows put an old Chinese takeout carton into the trash while he puts a pile of Dick’s old case files into an empty drawer in his desk.

 _Oh, that’s what those are for,_ he thinks distantly. Mostly, he’s watching the shape of Jason’s shoulders under the leather jacket, and he’s aware that he’s standing in a room full of coworkers and friends, and that he probably looks like a creepy idiot, but he can’t quite make himself move. Jason emanates power and control, the shadows slide around him with practiced ease, like they’re extra hands.

Dick had never quite worked up the courage to ask Jason about the years he spent away, or who taught him to control the darkness. No one knows anything about Necromancy, except for the Necrom People, but it’s not exactly a forthcoming community. And Dick wonders, not for the first time, if Jason would even tell him. He tosses his head, flicking the white curl out of his eyes.

Dick clears his throat. “I got this, it’ll be enough for you to take half of the footage. Probably not for much else.”

Jason turns and offers him a thin-lipped smile. “Sorry, I just wanted to make it less cluttered. I didn’t throw any papers away.”

“No,” Dick waves his hand. “I don’t mind. It’s, uh. It’ll be your desk too, while you're here.”

Jason nods, stiff as a board, and Dick can swear he hears Morris and Perry snickering at them. He dismisses it, shooting them a light glare, and retakes his seat.

“Let’s watch some movies,” he says and cracks his knuckles.

-^-

Jason lets his forehead fall against the wood of Dick’s desk. He groans, low and pained, and Dick tears his eyes away from the millionth frame of grainy, blurry, security footage to look at him.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

He receives nothing but a grunt in response. Dick sticks his leg out and pokes Jason’s shin with the tip of his shoe. That earns him another grunt. Dick sighs. He looks at the digital clock he keeps on the desk and sees that it’s eight p.m. Hours have managed to slip by without him noticing, and also the fact that everyone else has left for the day. The night crew is probably already downstairs, setting up for their shift.

“Okay, two more videos, and then we’re out of here,” Dick says.

“I have to be at the school at six tomorrow,” Jason confesses, sitting up and blinking at Dick blearily. It's very old-man, isn't it, sleep early wake up early. Dick doesn't remember being a student, not really.

Dick wrinkles his nose. “Ew. I can give you a ride to your house,” the offer is out of Dick’s mouth before he fully registers he’s going to say it. Jason came back home six years ago, but their interactions have been sparse and short. They haven’t really been close since, well, _ever,_ actually. But still.

Jason’s eyes are wide, glowing softly, his mouth slightly open, like he didn’t expect that either. That makes Dick double down, hold his ground. He keeps eye contact, lets the silence drag on. When Bruce first adopted Tim, Dick hadn’t been thrilled. Jason had been dead for a year and Dick hadn’t really gotten over it, but Bruce had leveled him with that dead-fish stare and said: ‘Be nice to your brother.'

So Dick has spent the last nine years learning how to be an older brother. _You are going to take my sibling-ship and like it,_ he thinks viciously, even as another voice thinks, knee-jerk and rude: _older brothers don’t drool when their siblings bend over to throw your garbage away._

Whatever. He’s trying, right? Family dynamics are all Greek to Dick, who grew up in a mansion raised by a British butler and an absentee FBI agent, his roots grown in a travelling circus among trapeze artists and painted-people. He’s not entirely sure how adoptees behave regularly, especially when one out of three died and came back to life.

“Um. I drove my bike here, but thanks. For offering.”

Dick nods stiffly, he suddenly really wishes Jason hadn’t driven here. He wants, very badly, to make up for the twelve years he spent not being there for Jason. It’s selfish, probably, because it’s likely that Jason does not want him to make up for anything. Dick clears his throat and turns back to his computer.

“Two more videos,” he promises.

They hit jackpot, finally, finally, a clear shot of the goons about thirty minutes before Dick and Wally had arrived at the warehouse. Dick hits pause on it, screencaps the image and writes a very polite email to David in the tech analysis department. He’ll do some occult clarity enhancing thing, and then bam. In the morning Jason and Dick will have a lead.

Jason exhales out between his teeth. “Fucking Jesus. A million hours of footage from at least fifty different angles and we only get one clear shot of half of one guy’s face. Your job sucks.”

“I don’t have to hang out with preteens,” Dick retaliates even though, okay yeah, this took a lot out of him, too. 

Jason shrugs. “I’d rather take on Mandy Eaton and her toxic body spray than sit through this ever again.”

Dick offers him a grin. “We’ll send out an APB on this guy, maybe show it around the docks tomorrow when we go. As soon as we figure out who this is, we’ll have a chance at figuring out who the clown is.”

Jason sucks on his bottom lip, and Dick valiantly pretends he’s not watching that with avid fascination. No, he isn’t staring at the pink tip of Jason’s tongue, and his gaze definitely doesn’t track the spit Jason licks along the seam of his mouth.

“I think I have a faster solution to that.”

Dick nods, makes a _go-ahead_ gesture. “By all means.”

“I’ll meet you here tomorrow? Around ten?”

“Sure. But if you want to go somewhere in the morning, we’ll have to meet Wally at lunch.”

Jason’s eyes narrow. Dick grins again, he can’t help it. That is never, ever going to get old. He shuts off his computer and stands, stretching his arms above his head and cracking the kinks out of his back. Dick is not meant to sit in a chair for hours on end. As much as his trapeze-training had fallen away in recent years, Dick still goes to the Aerial Gymnastics gym and keeps that part of his life as close as he can manage.

He almost misses it, the split-second flicker of Jason’s eyes tracking Dick’s movement. He wants to mention it, like _hey, no, you’re not the first sexual crisis I’ve ever induced,_ but stops himself at the last second. Sometimes Dick feels like all he does is stick his feet in his mouth around Jason. The second best thing to do is shut up.

“Fine,” Jason rolls his eyes. “I’ll be nice to Wally.”

He walks Jason out to the front parking lot, and oh -- there it is. That motorcycle. It’s sleek, black, and utterly, utterly sexy. It’s that bad-boy thing Dick’s always been drawn to (all his exes are leather-wearing bisexual girls who would beat his ass just as soon as they’d kiss him, what can he say) with the appropriate amount of shininess and testosterone to make Dick do a double-take and stare. Dick’s not a bike person, he’s barely even a car person, but he can recognize fancy when he sees it.

He whistles, low and appreciative. Jason smirks and ducks his head, all _aw, shucks mister,_ and Dick likes that look on him.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Jason asks, peacocking shamelessly.

“Yeah. What do your coworkers at St Mary’s think about that?” he can’t help but ask, wondering if all the nuns titter and giggle when Jason rides up on the bike, all revved engine and shadows.

Jason shrugs. “They kind of think I’m possessed by a demon, but they haven’t thrown me out yet.”

Dick laughs. He fixes Jason with his most serious big-brother face. “Night, man.”

“Goodnight, Dick.”

Jason pulls his keys out of his pocket and walks over to sit in the cradle of the bike seat. Dick turns toward his sedan. He glances back over his shoulder, just for the image of Jason sitting on the bike, and finds Jason’s luminescent preternatural gaze already stuck to him.

He lifts his hand and waves goodbye. Jason waves back.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr.](https://jakowic.tumblr.com/)


End file.
